Andrew Skeet – Finding Time review

A good word to describe this album: Safe. This word in a few ways encapsulates the major emotion felt throughout this album. There’s this sense of emotional security throughout the album, like there is no dangers to experience whilst listening, nothing can hurt you. It’s just you and the intimacy of the beautiful orchestrations made by Andrew Skeet. The quieter, whispery moments leave you time to wonder how safe you really are, because there is a feeling of uneasiness and fear in these tracks (like Stop The Clock) but then almost immediately after, the orchestration soars and you feel safe once again.

With the underlying theme of safeness throughout, it does mean the same for the orchestrations at times. A couple of tracks don’t exactly go as far as I’d like them to, sort of doing what’s expected and not really experimenting. This doesn’t take from the fact they’re fantastically made tracks and sound incredible, but they could perhaps be more adventurous, and add more variety. Take for instance Nils Frahm’s 2013 live album Spaces, which expands on previously recorded tracks and stretches them out even longer than the originals and each moment becomes bigger and more epic than the last. Finding Time isn’t quite as grandiose and doesn’t leave drop your jaw in the same way. But it does leave you questioning what exactly it is that’s happening.

The major theme in the album is time. How does one find time? It’s a question that’s left unanswered and generally speaking people consider themselves as not having enough time in their busy day-to-day lives. And then we kill time when we find it (intentionally the longest track on the album I suspect), either wasted or utilised well. Or is time killed by a person in order to feel safe? Do we then reflect on our time and wonder if we used it well? For Andrew Skeet, the album opens with the short Passing Phase, possibly suggesting a moments after an after event, and everything beyond that is attempting to deal with it. The killing time, changing lines, and then reflecting. The album gets slightly darker towards the end after Taking Off, which is where suddenly things get unsafe for Skeet, The Unforgiving Minute creeps upon and then at the end he finds himself, Finding Time, but why exactly? There isn’t much of an explanation, searching for time is usually unsuccessful, because it’s something we can’t grasp, and yet we all need it.

It’s a tough album to decipher, and one that can leave many interpretations, but it’s very well-orchestrated and definitely a late night headphones album that you can easily get lost in.